The movie was set in Paris (of course!) But it didn't show all the usual picturesque scenes in Paris. In fact, there were only a few scenes where I could say with 100% certainty, ``Yes, that's Paris.'' It was almost all set in a bar, plus a hotel de rendez-vous, with some scenes set on the street, but with the camera focusing on the two main characters, not on the city.
This movie was called, in English, An Affair of Love. But in French, the title was Une Liaison Pornographique. Quite a difference! ``This faux documentary interviews a man and a woman who begin a sexually charged relationship after meeting through a newspaper ad.'' So says the blurb from the Art Academy, but actually the ad was placed, by the woman, in a sex magazine. She wanted to fulfill a particular fantasy, but we never see this fantasy or find out what it was. They go to a hotel de rendez-vous (the same hotel, over a period of many weeks), and the camera shows us only the closed door of the hotel room. The emphasis is on the relationship that develops between them, although they need meet except for the rendez vous and never even learn each other's names. We see a lot more of them talking in the café than of them in the hotel. And then interspersed with these scenes, there are shots of both of them being interviewed later about the experience, often telling conflicting stories and stories that conflict with the scenes we have seen.
There's something in this that touches on one of my fundamental obsessions, although I don't know quite how to explain it. It's not just the idea of anonymous sex. But it's somehow the idea that....
Somehow, in order to get to really important meaningful contact between two people, first of all one has to go through an enormous amount of, um, fluff. (``Where are you from, what sort of work do you do, what do you you do for fun?'' etc.) And I've always been attracted to stories about encounters between people where this fluff is avoided, where one goes straight to the essentials.
To me, a lot of the novels of Marguerite Duras are like this. Le Square, Moderato Cantabile. All the fluff is left out. Or Last Tango in Paris, the Bertolucci film with Marlon Brando and Romy Schneider. Or .... Probably all my favorite movies, in fact. Midnight Cowboy: the amazing friendship that develops between the Jon Voight character and the Dustin Hoffman character (``Ratso'').
So in this film last night, Une Liaison Pornographique, the relationship is by definition pornographic, and yet we see only a few sex scenes (always ``straight'' sex, the fantasy they meet to fulfill is never shown) and the emphasis is on the human relationship that develops between them without, as I say, their even knowing even each other's names. And at the end, they both decide (according to the interviews which are interspersed) that they are in love with the other, but each of them decides that the other doesn't want love (although each does in fact explicitly tell the other they're in love), and so they part, never to meet again.
A very French film. Meaning that one can't just do something, but one has to endlessly talk about it before and afterwards, discuss it to death. (Hm... That sounds like the way I am. Maybe that's the reason I like French movies and French culture so much.)